


Lucifer of Liege

by Twisted_Taffy



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, Lucifer of Liege, Prose Poem, Statues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 09:31:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12009927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twisted_Taffy/pseuds/Twisted_Taffy
Summary: A short prose poem inspired by the statue 'Lucifer of Liege' in  St. Paul's Cathedral, Liège.





	Lucifer of Liege

**Author's Note:**

> We highly recommend looking up the statue Lucifer of Liege before reading.

He seemed to me to be beautiful. From the moment I saw him I wanted to put him on paper, uncover the lines of his face in the soft charcoal, frame his eyes in graphite hair. He lived in a beanie cap and sweatshirt, and worn sneakers that seemed half a size too big covered at the top by dark jeans, their edges torn from too many encounters with the ground. He rarely spoke, but watched the world go by through a haze of the kind of darkness that comes with the back corners of cafes and classrooms. He was one of those sorts that everyone knows of but no one knows. He was friendly, if approached, in a quiet steadfast way. He rarely smiled, but when he did I wanted to brush it on canvas with the colors of the sunset lit sky.

Once I snuck to the top of the bell tower in the early hours of morning, on one of those nights where I was too awake to go to sleep because my head was buzzing with the sounds of the stories I always thought but rarely wrote. I saw him there, from around the corner of a post supporting the biggest bell. I saw his hair uncovered, flowing in waves of gold around the black horns that poked their way through. I saw his feet free from dingy athletic mesh, and where his toes narrowed to points that seemed more claw than nail. I saw his body uncloaked, and while a part of me might have wanted to let my hands wonder at this sculpture better than anything I could create in my dreams, the rest of me was frozen at the leather stretched from bone to bone as it pushed from his back like a veil of flesh reaching beyond him. I saw the tattoo of chains that wrapped around his wrist and his ankle and weighed him down like the ink was wrought from iron. And I knew that this was him, and I knew that I should leave, and I knew that I should know that he was bad and that quite possibly by watching him I too, was bad.

I stayed. I stayed and watched, from behind the corner of a post that bared the weight of the biggest bell. And I watched him cry.

And then I left.

I never said anything about who he was or that I knew who he was. I never said that I knew why he wore a beanie cap and sweatshirt and sneakers that were half a size too big. He went back to the dark corner and I went back to my studio and I drew him as I knew him but I never made his face. I couldn’t do justice to that face, marbleized in the sunrise as tears glimmered down wet stone. So I left him be.


End file.
